Science Fiction Art News

Sam writes to challenge our readers with story description looking for a title.

Do any of you out there know the title to this story?

I read a book when younger about a post apocalyptic world were different groups had survived only because of their genetically engineered changes.

The protagonist is of a group that have gills (if I recall, he also had some mystical training that let him walk a road of some kind that resulted in teleportation), and their enemies were a group lead by a red lizard man.

I think there may have been a sequel written, but I read this book nearly 20 years ago, and I have no clue what the title was (I think the cover had a red lizard headed humanoid in a desert setting).

This looks fun.

[via Michael May's Adventureblog]

• That Was The Millennium That Was by John Scalzi.
• @Lightspeed Magazine: "...for a single yesterday" by George R.R. Martin
• @Tor.com: "The Cage" by A.M. Dellamonica
• @Strange Horizons: "Father's Day" by Jen Larsen
• @The World SF Blog: The Basics of Flight" Part 2, Chapter 3, by Joyce Chng.
• Fantasy Book Critic: "The Birth of a Legend" by David Gemmel.

• SFFaudio lists Top 10 Free Audio Stories.@PodCastle: "Monstrous Embrace" by Rachel Swirsky, read by Elizabeth Green Musselman
• @StarshipSofa: "To Have and To Hold" by Langdon Jones
• @Pseudopod:
  • "My Body Your Banquet" By C.S.E. Cooney, Read by Jacquie Duckworth
  • "Sight Unseen" By R. Scott Shanks, Jr., Read by Rachel Swirsky
  • "The Lot" By C.M. Harris, Read by Eve
  • "Her Collection of Intimacy" By Paul Haines, Read by Graeme Dunlop
  • "Gulls" By Tim Pratt, Read by Tina Connolly
• Beware the Hairy Mango, Episode 39: "Pain Comes Not to the Bananaman" by Matthew Sanborn Smith.

• Kat & Mouse: Guns for Hire - "With Cat-like Tread" (Part Six)

Interviews & Profiles

• Functional Nerds Patrick Hester and John Anealio interview Peter V. Brett.

• Judge rules that Todd McFarlane owes Neil Gaiman back pay for Spawn characters.
• Syfy Announces Development Slate of 7 New Scripted Projects.

• Inside J.G. Ballard's archive.
• Ben Jeapes on Heroic fantasy
• Will Hindmarch on The Final Stretch of Shared Worlds.
• Discover Magazine on Good and Bad Science in Science Fiction.
• Barnes and Noble Plans Big Push for Nook E-Reader.
• NYT on eBook Reader Price War.
• Inside Movies on 10 Books That Would Be Geektastic Movies.

• Nuclear Coleslaw, a live-action fallout web-series:
• Episode 1, Episode 2, Episode 3.

REVIEW SUMMARY: Miéville's best book so far.

MY RATING:

BRIEF SYNOPSIS: In a London where the magical is normal, mages see fire coming for the city. Billy Harrow is utterly unprepared to find out he's supposed to avert the apocalypse.

MY REVIEW:
PROS: I was never quite sure what was coming next, and I laughed out loud, which is a first with a Miéville book.
CONS: Be warned that this is not a beach read. It is intense. The involvement of the UMA, while a necessary plot point, felt a bit like forcing personal politics into the thing.
BOTTOM LINE: This is not your everyday apocalypse.

I was prepared to be unimpressed, and to tell you the truth, I wanted to be. After The City and The City, which read like a mystery version of Through the Looking Glass, I couldn't see where Miéville was going to go next. He's stated his goal of writing a book in every genre, and with Kraken, he did not let the side down.

Kraken has something for everyone: it's got magic, it's got mayhem of the truly nasty sort, it's got political organizing, and it's got Billy Harrow - who is somehow the center on which the whole thing turns. Don't ask him why - he doesn't understand it either.

Billy starts off as the curator at an exhibit at the Darwin Centre in London. It's his turn to lead the tour group through when chaos ensues: Billy's exhibit is gone, and no one knows what happened. Things happen at lightning speed, and several groups with warring agendas are all interested in having Billy, and they all want him now.

One of the more interesting things that Miéville has done with Kraken is that he has made London itself a character in the book. London is alive, and communicates its thoughts and wishes through various systems, one of those being a system of mages called Londonmancers. The Londonmancers are not without their own interest in the theft of the exhibit.

Billy initially goes to his friend Leon for help, which turns out to be a bad idea. Billy is then caught up with a former co-worker, Dane Parnell, as he works to liberate the stolen artifact from those who would use it for their own ends. At the other end of the spectrum, Leon's girlfriend, the aptly named Marginalia (Marge for short), is furiously working to find out what has happened to Leon and Billy. She makes slow and steady progress.

Every character in this book has their own motive, and they are somewhat difficult to sort out. The book is intense, and for a lot of people, Miéville is an acquired taste. This one is worth investing the time, because it isn't about your everyday apocalypse. It wants to know who you are. As you read, so will you.

The contents of Black Static #17 (Cover art by Ben Baldwin) have been posted:

Stories

• "Orinoco" by Nina Allan
• "Between a Rock and a Hard Place" by Carole Johnstone
• "A Man of Ice and Sorrow" by Simon Kurt Unsworth
• "The Obscure Bird" by Nicholas Royle
• "Tu Sufrimiento Shall Protect Us" by Mercurio D. Rivera

• White Noise - news compiled by Peter Tennant
• Electric Darkness by Stephen Volk
• Interference by Christopher Fowler
• The Campaign for Real Fear - second ten winning 500-word stories selected by Maura McHugh and Christopher Fowler

• Case Notes by Peter Tennant
• Blood Spectrum by Tony Lee

Interviews & Profiles

• Brit Mandelo interviews Elizabeth Bear.
• Dark Wolf interviews Sarah Pinborough
• The Authors Speak interviews
• Joseph Gordon-Levitt on challenges of Inception's story and action scenes. (Plus: "Dreams on Screen" list.)

• Mark L. Van Name is donating 100% of his proceeds from the hardcover sales of his new novel, Children No More, to charity.
• 2011 Worldcon Rates Rise in October.
• Bruce Sterling passes along the news that There was no Big Bang.
• John Ottinger is guest editor of Residential Aliens Magazine.
• EVENT: As part of the Fantastic Fiction free reading series, Ellen Datlow and Matthew Kressel present Laura Anne Gilman & Mary Robinette Kowal Wednesday August 18th, 7pm at KGB Bar in NYC.
• J.J. Abrams producing period robot movie based on Boilerplate: History's Mechanical Marvel, a graphic novel-picture book hybrid by Paul Guinan and Anina Bennett.

• A. Lee Martinez on The Future Will Not Be Categorized.
• Maurice Broaddus on Why Do You People Still Need All that Black Stuff?
• John C. Wright on Depth, Height, and Mass of SF.
• Lavie Tidhar on Advice for Writers.
• Fantasy Literature on Why You Should Read Clive Barker.
• PCWorld lists 12 Technologies That Changed Everything. [via Interesting Pile]
• Sam Sykes vs. The Internet: A challenge for reviewers to read outside their comfort zones.

• Advantages to Dating a Trekkie.
• Cinematical has Daft Punk Tron: Legacy Score (maybe).

REVIEW SUMMARY: A wonderful science fiction caper novella by one of my favorite writers working today

MY RATING:

BRIEF SYNOPSIS: Luff Imbrey is a master thief working in the Archonate under the radar. He hopes to steal a fabled art object with the help of the essence of a woman dead 4,000 years.

MY REVIEW:
PROS: An interesting story with several good twists along the way.
CONS: At only 90 pages, it was a little short. I would love to have seen more of Luff, his stuff, and the worlds he is visiting/robbing.
BOTTOM LINE: Fans of Jack Vance, Clark Ashton Smith, Cordwainer Smith, or Donald Westlake should find this a wonderful time.

I love the work of Jack Vance. He wrote literate travelogues of interesting places and people across the universe and peppered them with fun stories. Matt Hughes has certainly taken on his role as Vance's successor and made the best of it. His stories of the Archonate, particularly those featuring Henghis Hapthorn have been wonderful tales of cultures and planets far from our own. The mind of a schemer like Henghis is always interesting to watch as plans are made, altered, scrapped, and re-made to achieve the results he desires.

Luff Imbrey, master con man and thief, has been seen before in Hughes' Black Brillion and a short story or two. This time, he is seeking to make a great score. He is after one the 406 eidolons left following the ritual suicide of the Iphigenza insectoid race. These are frightfully expensive and rare and much sought after by the obsessive collectors who pay high and ask no questions of provenance.

Consequently, the eidolons are heavily guarded. Except one which Imbrey desires to acquire. This eidolon features a quartet of Iphigenza insectiods in a pose. This is the Quartet of the title.

To achieve this goal, he has "liberated" the life mask of Waltrau Voillute, a noblewoman of the second tier nobility who's grandfather had one such eidolon. Grandfather is dead and the eidolon is locked inside a mutable maze which he used to imprison and torture his many enemies.

Waltrau has been dead for 4,000 years. But her essence has been preserved in the life mask which allows the wearer to experience the thoughts and senses of someone else. He has obtained the mask by bribing a minor official within the household to remove it from a sub-sub-basement where it languishes, forgotten.

Through perfectly foul means, Luff persuades Waltrau to assist him in the theft. In the planning of the theft, he finds himself too close to Archonate computer systems and decides to scuttle the plans and take the small loss, for to come into the scrutiny of the Archonate is to invite torture and prison and many worse things.

Waltrau, however, has discovered that she does not want to go back into Limbo and makes a counter-offer. In the maze, the Iphigenza eidolon is present and she can get to it, but there is another, even more valuable artifact there, the Bone Triptych.

The Bone Triptych is another even more fabled sculpture, carved from three large bones provided by the sculptor himself. The craft and quality of the carving is spectacular and it would be pure profit on the deal. The dual reward outweighs the potential risk of the Archonate and Luff decides to go for it. He has the perfect plan.

Of course, if he had a perfect plan and everything went as it should, this would be a very dull book. That is the beauty of the caper story. A plan comes together, a plan falls apart, someone makes new plans on the fly, new flies enter the ointment, the police are never where they are supposed to be and then the fun begins.

I had a lot of fun with this book. I love stories of the Archonate and the writing of Matt Hughes.

There are two editions of this novella - a regular one and a signed one. Go for the signed one. He's the real deal and you will be looking for signed books at some point. Get it now while it is less expensive. This is the Geek With (Lots of) Books hint of the day.

Editor Ellen Datlow has posted the table of contents and cover for her Young Adult vampire anthology new anthology Teeth: Vampire Tales, which she co-edited with Terri Windling.

1. "Things to Know About Being Dead" by Genevieve Valentine
2. "All Smiles" by Steve Berman
3. "Gap Year" by Christopher Barzak
4. "Bloody Sunrise" by Neil Gaiman
5. "Flying" by by Delia Sherman
6. "Vampire Weather" by Garth Nix
7. "Late Bloomer" by Suzy McKee Charnas
8. "The List of Definite Endings" by Kaaron Warren
9. "Best Friends Forever" by Cecil Castellucci
10. "Sit the Dead" by Jeffrey Ford
11. "Sunbleached" byNathan Ballingrud
12. "Baby" byKathe Koja
13. "In the Future When All's Well" by Catherynne M. Valente
14. "Transition" byMelissa Marr
15. "History" by Ellen Kushner
16. "The Perfect Dinner Party" by Cassandra Clare & Holly Black
17. "Slice of Life" by Lucius Shepard
18. "My Generation" by Emma Bull
19. "Why Light?" by Tanith Lee

There is still some time left to enter our A Wild Light giveaway , but hurry!

See the original post for the details on how to enter.

• Suvudu interviews Scott Sigler (podcast).
  
• The Agony Column has a recording of Brian and Wendy Froud (podcast).
• John Scalzi's The Big Idea: S.A. Swann.
• Angela Slatter interviews Kathleen Jennings.
• Jospeh Mallozzi's readers interview Alastair Reynolds.

• 2009 Scribe Awards Winners.
• Sci-fi author Brian Aldiss puts artwork on show.
• Novelist Anne Rice says she's leaving Christianity.
• Del Toro to Helm At The Mountains of Madness.

• Astrogator's Logs on Only Kowtowers Need Apply.
• Melissa Heidrich on Video games aren't just for boys: The new booming market for women.
• Phyllis Irene Radford on So You Want to Commit Novel #9: Short vs long.
• JM McDermott on What i think about when i think about heroic fantasy.
• Kristine Kathryn Rusch on The Freelancer's Survival Guide: The Benefits of Freelancing.
• Rachelle Gardner on Managing Expectations.
• Juliette Wade on When the set piece has to be UNBELIEVABLY AWESOME...
• Dario Ciriello on The Other Side of the Desk.
• Norman Spinrad on The Publishing Death Spiral, Part one: The Cold Equations.
• Rosemary Laurey on Where Stories Are Made.
• Mike Johnstone on The Mirrored Heavens and Forms of SF Narrative.
  
• Topless Robot on The 10 Hottest Doctor Who Companions.

• Rare Star Wars Photos, [via DBSW]

REVIEW SUMMARY: A fast-paced, action packed military science fiction thriller.

MY RATING:

BRIEF SYNOPSIS: In the aftermath of the destruction of the terrorist group Autumn Rain, U.S. Counterintelligence agent Claire Haskell finds her world upside-down, while it becomes clear that the Rain is not gone for good, and they have much larger plans of their own.

MY REVIEW:
PROS: Williams knows and understands everything that goes into warfare, and blends in a good environment of post-human cyberpunk and military science fiction action to keep you awake at night.
CONS: The action overwhelms the narrative at points, and coupled with a strange writing style, the book could be a chore to get through.
BOTTOM LINE: Despite some of the problems with the text, this is a fun, interesting story that continues the first book of the trilogy.

Science Fiction author Peter Watts described the first book in the series as "Explod[ing] out of the gate like a sonic book and never stops."

That's a very accurate statement about this series in general, and The Burning Skies picks up the momentum from the first book in the series, The Mirrored Heavens, and runs with it. Where the last story ended, with the Autumn Rain's apparent destruction, and Haskell revealed as being the next stage of post-humanism, essentially becoming what the Rain wanted in the first place, this book moves forward from there, seeing the last stand of the terrorist group, and revealing that they have far more at stake than previously thought: they are pushing for a future of post-humanism.

Williams has put together a fun story with this trilogy, and the future that he puts forward is one that feels very realistic, relevant and downright scary at points. There seems to have been a recent trend in very good cyberpunk / near future science fiction stories, with realistic worlds as a main feature, and it's clear that there's been a lot of consideration and thought put into how the future might look: hyper-cyber networks, political work gone amok and humanity poised on its next step of ... something.

Action forms up quite a bit of the story, something familiar to anyone who's read the first book: Williams can write action like nobody's business, and should this ever be set to screen, it will be a spectacular scene indeed. There's a lot of detail, movement and shooting in all directions, and in this instance, Williams' short, choppy writing style fits well, moving the story along nicely, until there is a lag in the action.

The action is also one of the downsides to the book, unfortunately, because like the first book in the trilogy, it absolutely overwhelms the novel at points, and this book took me far longer than expected to read, because I had to go back and re-read sections, or read at a breakneck pace, hoping to catch the story as I ran past.

The other real downside to the story is the characters, which felt a bit more flat this time around: given the amount of action and events in the story, we're treated to a whole host of characters who play vital roles in the book, but at points, I found that there wasn't as much character depth as there should have been, nor as much as I had remembered from the first book. As a result, there were times that I found myself wondering if this book was a placeholder between the first and third books in the trilogy, and still am not sure.

That being said, the book is well worth reading: Williams has put together an intense, interesting future, and demonstrates a knowledge of what goes into warfare, and as a result, this is a fairly spectacular military science fiction thriller that goes to the heart of what makes up warfare. There are political, scientific and personal angles that all come together in a clash of violence and profanity, and once the momentum started on this read, it was hard to stop.

Weslayan University Press has posted the table of contents for the awesome-looking anthology The Wesleyan Anthology of Science Fiction edited by Arthur B. Evans, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr., Joan Gordon, Veronica Hollinger, Rob Latham, & Carol McGuirk.

Check out this table of contents, organized by story theme:

Alien Encounters

1. C. L. Moore, "Shambleau" (1933)
2. Stanley Weinbaum, "A Martian Odyssey" (1934)
3. Arthur C. Clarke, "The Sentinel" (1951)
4. Robert Sheckley, "Specialist" (1953)
5. Robert Silverberg, "Passengers" (1968)
6. Nancy Kress, "Out of All Them Bright Stars" (1985)
7. Gene Wolfe, "Useful Phrases" (1992)
8. James Patrick Kelly, "Think Like a Dinosaur" (1995)

9. H. G. Wells, "The Star" (1897)
10. Fritz Leiber, "Coming Attraction" (1950)
11. Ray Bradbury, "There Will Come Soft Rains" (1950)
12. J. G. Ballard, "The Cage of Sand" (1962)
13. Octavia E. Butler, "Speech Sounds" (1983)
14. Misha Nogha, "Chippoke Na Gomi" (1989)

15. Nathaniel Hawthorne, "Rappaccini's Daughter" (1844)
16. Isaac Asimov, "Reason" (1941)
17. Alfred Bester, "Fondly Fahrenheit" (1954)
18. Avram Davidson, "The Golem" (1955)
19. Brian Aldiss, "Super-Toys Last All Summer Long" (1969)
20. Ursula K. Le Guin, "Nine Lives" (1969)
21. Ted Chiang, "Exhalation" (2008)

22. Philip K. Dick, "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale" (1966)
23. William Gibson, "Burning Chrome" (1982)
24. Pat Cadigan, "Pretty Boy Crossover" (1986)
25. Eileen Gunn, "Computer Friendly" (1989)

26. Jules Verne, from Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864)
27. Edmond Hamilton, "The Man Who Evolved" (1931)
28. Clifford D. Simak, "Desertion" (1944)
29. Frank Herbert, "Seed Stock" (1970)
30. Charles Stross, "Rogue Farm" (2003)

31. Leslie F. Stone, "The Conquest of Gola" (1931)
32. Frederik Pohl, "Day Million" (1966)
33. Samuel R. Delany, "Aye, and Gomorrah . . ." (1967)
34. Pamela Zoline, "The Heat Death of the Universe" (1967)
35. Joanna Russ, "When It Changed" (1972)
36. James Tiptree Jr., "And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill's Side" (1972)
37. Carol Emshwiller, "Abominable" (1980)
38. Greg Egan, "Closer" (1992)

39. Robert A. Heinlein, " 'All You Zombies-'" (1959)
40. Stanislaw Lem, "The Seventh Voyage" from Star Diaries (1971)
41. John Varley, "Air Raid" (1977)
42. Kate Wilhelm, "Forever Yours, Anna" (1987)
43. John Kessel, "Invaders" (1990)

44. E. M. Forster, "The Machine Stops" (1909)
45. R. A. Lafferty, "Slow Tuesday Night" (1965)
46. Harlan Ellison, "'Repent, Harlequin!' Said the Ticktockman" (1965)
47. Geoff Ryman, "Everywhere" (1999)

48. Theodore Sturgeon, "Thunder and Roses" (1947)
49. Judith Merril, "That Only a Mother" (1948)
50. William Tenn, "The Liberation of Earth" (1953)
51. Cordwainer Smith, "The Game of Rat and Dragon" (1955)
52. Bruce Sterling, "We See Things Differently" (1989)

[via Anya Weber]

• Times Live interviews Lauren Beukes (podcast).
• CBC Ottawa interviews Amal El-Mohtar (The Honey Month) (podcast).
• Ron Hogan interviews Leanne Renee Hieber.
• Matt Staggs interviews Lou Anders.
• David Steffen interviews Eugie Foster.
• Angela Slatter interviews L.L. Hannett.
• Starship interviews Langdon Jones. (podcast)

• Margo Lanagan's awesome story "Singing My Sister Down" is headed to the stage. (Poster)
• Amazon Reveals New Kindle: $139 For Wi-Fi Version, $189 for 3G.
• New BSG Series, Blood and Chrome, Coming Soon.

• Cheryl Morgan on A Genre Like Any Other.
• Jim C. Hines on Endings.
• SFWA on 5 Resources on the Public Domain.
• Christopher L. Dinkins & Jeremy L. C. Jones on Those Who Are Left Alive: 11 Writers on Reading Zombie Fiction.
• Rachelle Gardner on Mythbusting.
• Aliette de Bodard on Narrative, Resonance and Genre.
• Janice Hardy on Re-Write Wednesday: Overcoming Adversity Through Adverbs.
• Abigail Nussbaum on Making Yourself Heard: You're Maybe Doing it Wrong?
• Nicola Morgan on Self Editing - My Guide.
• Damien G. Walter asks Where is the Booker winning SF?
• John Scalzi asks Does Your Favorite Sci-fi Movie Do Right by Its Female Characters?
• Aliette de Bodard on Narrative, Resonance and Genre.
• Andrew Liptak on Soylent Green.

• Great White Snark rounds up Comic-Con 2010 Slave Leia Costumes.
• 24 awesome Star Wars cupcakes. Mmmm...Chewie...
• SFFaudio lists Top 10 Free Audio Stories!

In honor of the Shared Worlds teen SF/F writing camp, we asked this week's panelist for writing advice...

Here's what they said...

The best advice no one actually gave me was to read a lot of any and everything.

The thing I didn't understand about the writing life was how public it can be. It looked very private when I imagined it -- there you are, alone in your room, pulling images as fast as you can from that clown-car between your ears we call your brain. You need please no one, but yourself. I didn't think at all about reviews and reader reactions and sales figures. I didn't picture interviews and readings. The alone-in-your room part is still the part I like best.

He told me to read. To read everything -- every type of fiction and non-fiction -- and never stop. I'd wanted to write for as long as I can remember and put out my first magazine, Outlaw's Own, entirely written by me, at the age of nine, typing on a borrowed upright typewriter using carbon paper, so I had as many copies as would come through on the carbons. My mother sent me to Pitman's College so I could learn shorthand and typing (shorthand was for journalists in the age before portable recorders!) and get a job in Fleet Street.

In other words, I had always wanted to write. I knew writers from an early age and knew that few of them made more money, say, than the local hard-working GP, so I was perfectly realistic in my expectations. I don't know anything else I would have been except a singer/songwriter, which is what I do when not writing. Maybe an actor. I was thought to have a talent for that. But I'm sure I would have continued to write prose, no matter what.

His point with these games, I believe, was that criticism, even if it comes from credentialed authority figures, is often useless to the writer who does not also possess a somewhat accurate sense of the quality of his or her own work. Opinions of art are ultimately subjective; moreover, criticism is a craft, and like any craft, not everyone is skilled at it. A writer with too little self-confidence will take all criticism at equal value, and will end up pleasing no one by attempting to please everyone. On the other hand, a writer with too much self-regard will take little if any advice at all, no matter how tactful or perceptive it is, and as a result will be unlikely to improve his or her skills beyond mediocrity. The ability to perform an accurate self-assessment of one's work in the light of responses to it is crucial if a writer is to distinguish between criticism that is useful and will help to improve one's craft, and criticism that is wrong-headed for one reason or another, and best disregarded.

Bonus question 1: If I'd known then what I know now about the writing life, would I have continued to pursue it? Well, it ended up taking me fourteen years to write and publish my first novel, one that, when I began it, I naively thought would be on shelves in four years at the latest. But after all that work, the novel seems to have made people happy, and it's satisfying to be able to point at something that's evidence that you've accomplished something in life. So my answer to this is pretty much "yes," though I'm crazy that way, and it's perhaps also true that for a new writer who's interested in making a career of it, it's best not to have much of an idea of what you're getting into. Naiveté is not necessarily a bad thing.

Bonus question 2: How much of a disconnect was there between my vision of the writing life and the reality of it? At first I don't think I realized how much of good writing involves lots and lots of rewriting, and how much of the business of books should be considered part of the craft. When I completed the second draft of The Dream of Perpetual Motion (my first draft was handwritten) I felt done with the whole thing-all I had to do was get it published, which would be the easy part! Then I looked at that draft again and realized that I was only half done, if that. And after you've finally gotten your writing into good enough shape to try to sell it, you have to find an agent, and find an editor, and turn the manuscript into a book, and go through all the constant revision and improvement that happens during that process. I found it to be worth it in the end, but for someone doing it for the first time it can seem like it's going to take forever, and I now have a better idea of the time and effort that the writing life requires if you're going to be serious about it.

The finest advice I ever received early on in my career, which started on my 20s, was from Shawna McCarthy, then editor at Asimov's, later my editor at Bantam, then my agent for a time --was (and I paraphrase): 'if in doubt, cut it out.' That I still stand by --you know instinctively what the good and the less good is. Follow your instincts. They've brought you here in the first place.

The disconnect? It's a lot less well paid than you think. A lot.

I believe potential writers should be exposed to two kinds of teaching: the kind that makes you follow all the rules, and the kind that encourages you to break them. I'm grateful to those who drilled me in spelling, grammar and literary analysis, but I'm going to single out the teacher who told our class to write anything.

We were the students of Upper Six Science, our heads full of chemistry, biology, physics and mathematics. The Use of English class was a necessary evil to most of us, intended to resurrect our skills so that we would not embarrass ourselves in the essay-based, compulsory General Paper. It was our first English assignment in more than a year. We grilled our new teacher, demanding to know what topic, how many words, what was the point. His response was vague, his manner relaxed. He just wanted to see what level of writing we could produce.

Write anything, any length, whatever you like.

That simple instruction unlocked a barrier I hadn't realised was there. Instead of having to guess at what the teacher wanted me to write, I could create what I wanted the teacher to read. I had indeed been building a world on the side, drawing Tolkienesque maps at the back of maths class and writing up spare exercise-books with (formulaic) prose and (bad) epic poetry about apprentice warriors. But I showed him none of that. Instead, I wrote pages (more, and more easily, than if I had been held to a word limit) about a student's perspective on English assignments:

The teacher is new. I have not yet evaluated his likes and dislikes. Would a dry, educational, researched piece do, or would he relish something lighter? Dare I try humour? What can make this teacher laugh?

Keep on writing and perhaps you will become an unusually articulate scientist if I cannot persuade you to join the ranks of the artists!

I can't say much about the writer's life. I'm still learning it as I go along, a new experience from day to day. What did I imagine it would be like? Nothing spectacular. I come from a culture that expects artists to starve, and I know that for every socially-stable and financially-secure writer there's an eccentric for whom fame and fortune came either too early or too late. I'm willing to be surprised - pleasantly, I hope!

I think the biggest difference between my perception of the writing life and reality is that I imagined that being a writer would be more private. I pictured sitting in an office somewhere and typing a lot. But actually, there is a lot of travel involved and a lot of public speaking. Writing is the most important part of the job, of course, and I still get to sit in my office and type -- but I also do a lot of typing in hotel rooms, in airports, and in coffee shops. I didn't expect that -- and as a nervous public speaker, it took me a long time to acclimate.

Of course, like many a piece of good advice, it's something I've implemented only occasionally, and even then only partially, depending on the project. Which is to say I cheat-with my first novel, for example, the intended audience I was writing for was myself, or rather, myself when I was a weird little teenager. In trying to write something that I would have loved as a teen-and, ideally, as an adult as well-I also thought about what my friends in high school would have enjoyed, as so much of what I read came on their recommendations and vice versa, and quite a few of them and I played a lot of roleplaying games, which is very much collaborative storytelling. So I was writing the novel with a specific audience in mind, but it wasn't strictly one individual, and it was at least a partially internal audience to boot.

The real thrust of Vonnegut's advice is what has stuck with me, the point being that no single project or author can do everything-the sooner we comes to terms with this the better, as it helps to focus the creative energies on what we really want to do, rather than what we feel we ought to do. In my experience, good writing comes from a place of desire rather than obligation. And like all pieces of good advice, this should be implemented however and whenever the individual sees fit-perhaps the best piece of writing advice that no single person has confided in me but many an author has opinioned is that no criticism or advice is absolute, and to take even the most revered master's advice with as many or as few grains of salt as one sees fit. We should be receptive but we should also be critical, both of our own writing and the advice we are given about it, and in the end whatever works best for the individual works best for the individual.

In terms of whether or not I would have pursued a writing life if I knew as a teenager what I know now about it, the answer is easy: of course. That said, my case has been very different from what I expected, and in all the best ways. I started writing as a youth with the expectation that I would never make any money off my fiction, and that I had better find something that I both enjoyed doing and could definitely make a living off of in order to support the writing. At first that was managing a video store and later on it was working in a law firm doing clerical work, and I acquired a bachelor's degree to the end of trying to get a teaching position-summer's off seemed a fine way to ensure I could get some writing done, and I liked the idea of having the sort of positive effect on students that my teachers had on me. The rare good ones, anyway. That I begin to sell short fiction and then landed a book deal for a novel all came as wildly unexpected (but very welcome) surprises, despite the fact that I had been writing and submitting fiction for a little over a decade before that first novel sold-as I said, I full well expected to wait quite a bit longer before I sold anything of length, and still think that was a healthy attitude to foster as it helped stave off some (although certainly not all) of the doubt and anxiety that comes with being a writer.

As for the disconnect between how I envision the writing life and the reality of it, that's slowly diminishing the longer I work-the harder I work and the more realistic I allow myself to be the narrower the gap grows. I suppose to some extent I always imagined writing and the writing life to be this incredibly isolated experience, and in many ways it certainly is, but there is also an incredible amount of outside support that makes the whole experience infinitely more bearable. I'm speaking partially of family and friends who help us take breaks from ourselves and our work, of course, but I'm also talking about the other writers, filmmakers, musicians, and everyone else who we don't personally know but whose work in turn nourishes and inspires our own writing life. Nobody writes in a vacuum, as much as we may sometimes imagine we do.

Here's what I heard: "You're a talented writer, Will, and as long as you write, people will read you and talk about you." I sort of missed the point.

When I was in college, I had a cunning medievalist and critical-literature expert for a professor, called Lisa Haines Wright. She was a silver-haired gesticulator, and I imagine she still is. Here's how she once described me: "brilliant and irresponsible."

Here's what I heard: "You're either a gifted writer, who should only write when you feel brilliant, and to whom deadlines do not apply, or you're a no-good hack who doesn't have what it takes to make it as a writer." My melodramatic college brain couldn't reconcile the truth of it, and this is where the bonus points come in.

Both of those teachers were giving me key advice that I only made simple sense of later-a few failures as a writer and it was like I eventually put on prescription glasses and could finally read what they were writing to me. The lesson was simple, it just wasn't easy, and I later committed it to memory as a honed phrase, too obvious to ignore: Writers write. I keep that taped up next to my desk. Writers write.

Somehow I'd gotten it into my head that if it wasn't good-no, if it wasn't great-it wasn't worth writing. This is patently ridiculous. This completely ignores the power and purpose of rewriting.

For me, at least, the great advice I got as a youth didn't really become clear until I had learned the lessons the hard way. Then the advice I got-about voice, about truth in writing, about clarity and leaving room for the reader's imagination-came trickling back to me over years, making real sense only when I could apply it as salves to the cuts and burns I was accumulating in the actual field of writing for a living. I'm not a full-time novelist (yet?), so the writing life isn't what I envisioned (yet?). But it has a lot in common with what I expected: a job of research and writing, cycling and overlapping. It's about showing up to work every day and sitting in the chair and writing the writing. Everything else comes second because nothing else can happen unless the writer writes.

Part of what's so energizing and inspiring about Shared Worlds is watching actual, practical writing advice seep into the students, watching it inform in real time. These kids, they're smarter than I was. They're getting the lessons already and, I hope, holding on to them.

The deadlines of the camp also teach the students some of the most valuable lessons that I've learned as a professional, about writing through blocks and trusting in rewrites. These kids don't have time to waffle and worry. They want to be read so they have to produce. They don't have time to wait for inspiration, they have to learn to write until the inspiration comes, and then write some more. Writers write.

I would pursue writing no matter what -- and I have. Nothing has changed. I've always done it even when I didn't have overt encouragement, and if that's a part of who you are, then no matter how hard it is to do it professionally, you drive on. There isn't a lot of disconnect for me. I had a family member who worked for HarperCollins when I was in the process of being good enough to be published, so I saw what it was like behind the scenes, a bit. I went to conventions and heard editors and agents speak. I think I maintain a pretty realistic view of it -- that to have your foot in the door is fortunate and I'm extremely grateful -- and at the same time knowing that you're only in the room as long as you do the work. Nothing in life is a free ride so neither should writing be. I love writing, it's difficult and it will test you, but knowing who you are as a person as well as a writer off-sets the insecurity of the business. If you know that you're compelled to do something regardless of the outside world then that's a stable foundation on which to build a career -- it will tide you through the ups and downs that will inevitably come in 'the life.'